Sequoia and Nvidia back David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence at $5.1B

Ineffable Intelligence, the London AI startup founded by David Silver (creator of AlphaGo, AlphaZero, AlphaStar), has raised funding from Sequoia Capital and Nvidia at a $5.1B valuation. The company, incorporated in November 2025, has no product or revenue. Silver's thesis challenges the LLM paradigm, arguing that reinforcement learning — not human-data-trained models — is the path to superintelligence, citing AlphaGo's Move 37 as proof that RL can discover knowledge beyond human intuition. Nvidia's venture arm contributed at least $250M. The deal fits a broader pattern of investors betting billions on credentialed AI researchers rather than existing products, alongside similar raises by Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab.